Tag: patent

Hot Links – Now With 10% Less MSG

Robert Goddard Patent 1914

A happy dog in a pile of leaves [via].

Dog puzzle.

What a hurricane sounds like: Hurricane Ike 2008 [via].

“Hey, yinz. Stillers ain’t jagoffs. We gotcha tear-bull talls, yah.”  This long linguistic analysis of Pittsburghese is missing one thing: audio examples of the dialect [via].

It’s also come to my attention that the Pittsburgh “yinzer” accent was voted the most annoying dialect in the Nation, and I disagree. The New York accent that pronounces the word “all” as “ohl” is worse than the Southern California accent (made famous in Zappa’s “Valley Girl“) that inflects statements into questions?

Shipwrecks.

Amazing wood carving.

Sparkling bat poop [via].

Robert Goddard’s 1914 Patent for a liquid-fueled rocket. Consider that in 1914 we barely knew how to design airplanes. In those days, the fuel gauge was a pocket watch hung on a nail.
[Top image from here.]

Eileen & The Hot Links

Michael Jackson’s 1993 Patent is cool, but he likely got the idea from this guy.

Hominid will creep you out. [via]

Sea star suppertime.

Tattoo Spellcheck.

Nothing but Plague Doctors. Prior to medical/scientific knowledge about the causes of The Black Death, Plague Doctors risked their lives attempting to treat the infected while trying to protect themselves from the  “miasma.” The very sight of a Plague Doctor terrified people as he was a harbinger of death, and due to his specialty, a Plague Doctor was often forced to be a recluse himself.

I missed the debut of the The Butter Dance, but inadvertently featured it here. Don’t try this at home, or anywhere for that matter. After all *ahem* Melati Suryodarmo is a professional. [h/t kdub]

Retro Pron – 1890s.  Drool away me laddies. Drool away.

J. V. Lafferty’s Contribution to the World

lucy-the-elephant-building2_amazing-building.jpg

If you lived here, you wouldn’t need to keep your old trunk in the attic. From Wikipedia:

James Vincent de Paul Lafferty, Jr. (1856-1898) was an Irish-American inventor, most famous for his construction of Lucy the Elephant. Born to Irish parents in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, he received Patent Number 268503, on December 5, 1882 to protect his original invention, as well as any animal-shaped building. Broke by 1887, he was forced to sell her and in 1898, he died, and is buried in the cemetery of St. Augustine’s Catholic Church in Philadelphia.

This architectural gem was built, still stands, and is protected as an historical something or other. [You can see Lucy in all her glory in this previous post.]

Hermann Reiche’s Contribution to the World

Q: How does an elephant hide in a cherry tree?
A: It paints its toenails red. Duh.

Q: How does the elephant get up in the tree to begin with?
A: Go ask Hermann Reiche. Doi.

elephant-tree-ladder.jpg

“In 1891, Hermann Reiche patented a platform “to enable an elephant to climb up a tree.”

I bet he made tens of dollars with this patent, tree branch butts mortised and lag-bolted into a tree stump. Wish I’d thought of it first. What a guy.

[Drawing and caption from Futility Closet. Related post here.]